[wushupork]

It depends on what business you are in. If yours is primarily a B2B - design may or may not be that important. If you can solve a pain point - it doesn't matter what the solution looks like. You can see the result of that in any SMB software product - they look horrible.

However if you are trying to do a B2C people have wildly different expectations. They've seen better online products. Consumer internet products these days set a pretty high bar in design and user experience and if you don't have that, it will be difficult to get them to use your product.